How long until someone launches a six or eight core smart phone? With most laptops still running four cores, do you think we’ll be in a lull period before we see a power efficient six or eight core cell phone? Will Nvidia be the first with Tegra 5 (we know the Tegra 4 likely will still be quad). Will Apple do it? or Qualcomm with their Snapdragon line? We could even see a Samsung Exynos in the mix now too.

Core is not everything . Even a Single core processor can beat quad core processor in some case like Intel Atom which is a single core 1.6 Ghz processor beats One X in some case . I know that the performance will increase with core’s but it will eat more power and one more thing that if you are multi-tasking on 6-8 core phone then all of you core will not help you to run those programs . If 1st core is on Full load then program’s will use 2nd core like this it continue . I dont think that you need more than 4 core in a Phone because the rest of the core will be of no use and they will also use power as well as they will be costly , So there is no need to have 6-8 core on a Phone , Simply if you want to increase performance then increase the number of Transistors on one core . This will Increase the Performance . That’s why Intel Atom single core 1.6 Ghz processor compeates with One X , SIII …

As Prasoon said. More cores does not neccessarily mean better performance. It mostly depends on apps running independently or multithreading, so more cores generally isn’t going to mean your game runs faster; it means that the battery monitor in the background will begin writing data to the drive in .2 millinseconds rather than .3 ms.

In fact, it could make performance worse in many cases, as more cores=more heat=slower safe clock speed, although cores that turn themselves off when idle could help with that. That’s the main reason Intel chips are generally considered better than AMD; hyperthreading allows for one processor to act as two in a way that only extremely few applications are affected, while producing less heat and letting the base speed be higher.

Check out the day 13 prizehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Optimus_4X_HD
“The LG Optimus 4X HD holds the Nvidia Tegra 3 chip. The chip has four physical cores clocked at 1.5 GHz in addition to a lower-clocked fifth core. The fifth core is clocked up to 500 MHz and runs when the handset is idle or doing only simple tasks.”

I don’t think we will see the addition of cores for the sake of it like we have seen in the number of blades in men’s razors. Unless there is a significant increase in performance AND increased battery performance,

It does not only depend on the cores, or how high the clock is. It’s also important what kind of operations can be executed per clock. x86 are usually able to do big operations per clock. So there are many factors which need to be improved before any new clocks are added. And parallelization can work only to some point until it can also be a slow down as the parallized data needs to be put together again.

Really, for speed, you probably want to see increased clock speed and advancements in the architecture.

But we are limited in the way we advance these as they interact with battery consumption, and, soon enough, heat dissipation. We could add two cores, but that would probably hurt battery life more than a similar jump in raw clock speed — and both more than they’re worth.

So… I don’t think you know what you’re talking about. Phones will get faster, not that they really need to, and the number of cores will only increase when that would be appropriate, which will be a long, long time from now.

What we really need is a breakthrough in battery technology. I think we’ve gotten to the point where batteries are really slowing mobile progress. It’s been a long time since there was a major breakthrough in battery technology.

yes next year well probably wont see 8-core devices.atleast not from the top manufacturers.
tegra 4 will be a quad core a15 with variable gpu config.
samsung will release quad core exynos 5XXX .the dualcore version of the chip used in NEXUS 10.
qualcomm snapdragon will also bump the speed to 2ghz or above ..

I think chip makers are going to work more on efficiency rather than speed in the next years. Others have said it and I agree that judging the phone based on the number of cores can get you a slow phone with a lot of cores. There are several 2 core phones that are really fast.

I am hoping they will focus now on longer battery life while retaining the speed of the top chips while improving speed as well but not making it the primary focus.

In my opinion having a chip with a super lean core to run basic phone functions and variable start up on the other cores is key. I want consistent all day battery life.

I think they are going to focus more on smaller die sizes and more efficiency out of the current models they have. I think likely we will see quad core a15 for awhile since those are plenty able to handle anything thrown at them while also being pretty efficient. Like others have said, it’s not all about how many cores it has I mean look at qualcomm’s dual core s4 being able to hang with most quad core chips out there.